a chronicle prof. charles taylor 2007 templeton · pdf filetempleton prize a chronicle prof....

T E M P L E T O N P R I Z E

A CHRONICLE

Prof. Charles Taylor2007 Templeton Prize Laureate

For Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities

including research in love, creativity, purpose, infinity, intelligence,

thanksgiving and prayer.

Templeton Prize Press Conference | New York City | March 14, 2007

Buckingham Palace Prize Presentation | London | May 2, 2007

The British Academy: A Conversation with Charles Taylor | London | May 2, 2007

12007 Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities

It is a great privilege to welcome our 2007 TempletonPrize Laureate, Professor Charles Taylor of McGillUniversity in Montreal, and currently professor of law and philosophy at Northwestern University inEvanston, Illinois. He will share some comments and answer your questions in just a few minutes.

Our format this morning is as follows: First, I shallshare with you some of the perspectives of myFather, Sir John Templeton, when he established theTempleton Prize Program and the John TempletonFoundation. Because my Father is now 94 years old, he finds that the rigors of international travel are overly taxing on him. He sends his sincerestapologies, therefore, for his not being able to be withus this year. However, he asked me to share with you his joy in the wisdom of the judges in selectingProfessor Taylor as the 2007 Templeton Prize Laureate.

After my introductory comments, I shall thenintroduce Mr. Michael Goldbloom, the Vice-Principal of McGill University, who will offer the congratulationsof the institution where Charles Taylor has served asprofessor since 1961.

This will be followed by Mr. Michel Robitaille,Delegate General of the Québec Government Officein New York, who will offer his government’scongratulations to Professor Taylor.

Following Mr. Robitaille, I will introduce Daniel Sullivan,Consul General of Canada in New York, representingthe Government of Canada.

Finally, I shall highlight the accomplishments ofProfessor Taylor which clearly influenced the judges in their selection of him as this year’s Prize Laureate.After this brief review, Professor Taylor will share with us some of the perspectives of his life’s work in philosophy and the humanities. Then, afterProfessor Taylor’s comments, we shall open the floor to questions.

The Templeton Prize is the world’s largest annual prize given to an individual. This year’s award is in the amount of £800,000 Sterling, more than 1.5 million dollars.

The Prize is a cornerstone of the John TempletonFoundation’s international efforts to serve as aphilanthropic catalyst for discovery in areas engaginglife’s biggest questions, which we describe as rangingfrom explorations into the laws of nature and theuniverse to questions on the nature of love, gratitude,forgiveness, and creativity.

Certainly, a big question which illustrates the missionof the Prize and our Foundation is one that ProfessorTaylor is currently engaged in and has written andlectured on extensively throughout his extraordinarycareer of nearly half a century.

That question is: “What is the role of spiritual thinkingin the 21st Century?”

Our Foundation’s vision is derived from my Father’scommitment to progress through rigorous scientificresearch and related scholarship. The Foundation’smotto “How little we know, how eager to learn”

STATEMENT BY

John M. Templeton, Jr., M.D.AT THE TEMPLETON PRIZE PRESS CONFERENCE, NEW YORK CITY, MARCH 14, 2007

Cover image: Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) courtesy of UCO/Lick Observatory

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PRESS CONFERENCE STATEMENT 1 John M. Templeton, Jr., M.D.

PRESS CONFERENCE STATEMENT 3 Mr. Michael E. Goldbloom

PRESS CONFERENCE STATEMENT 5 Mr. Michel Robitaille

PRESS CONFERENCE STATEMENT 6 Mr. Daniel Sullivan

PRESS CONFERENCE STATEMENT 9 Prof. Charles Taylor

PREPARED PRESS CONFERENCE STATEMENT 11 Prof. Charles Taylor

CLOSING STATEMENT 14 John M. Templeton, Jr., M.D.

PHOTOS 15 Presentation of the 2007 Templeton Prize

THE BRITISH ACADEMY 16 Welcome by Baroness O’Neill

THE BRITISH ACADEMY 17 Introduction by Charles L. Harper, Jr., D.Phil.

THE BRITISH ACADEMY 18 Statement by Prof. David Martin

THE BRITISH ACADEMY 21 Statement by Lord Parekh

THE BRITISH ACADEMY 25 Statement by Prof. Leszek Kolakowski

THE BRITISH ACADEMY 27 Statement by Sir Jonathan Sacks

THE BRITISH ACADEMY 30 Statement by Lord Sutherland

THE BRITISH ACADEMY 33 Response by Prof. Charles Taylor

PRINCIPALS 40

JUDGES 40

LAUREATES 40

Good morning ladies and gentlemen. As Chairman and President of the

John Templeton Foundation, I am delighted to welcome all of you to the

annual news conference for the announcement of the 2007 Templeton Prize.

exemplifies our support for open-minded inquiry andour hope for advancing human progress throughbreakthrough discoveries. By honoring those whoseresearch and discoveries have opened newperspectives and insights into such spiritual realitiesas purpose, love, and thanksgiving, the Prize fostersan environment that encourages others to help usmore fully understand ourselves and our universe.

You may recall that five years ago the name of the Prize, which is now in its thirty-fifth year, waschanged to: The Templeton Prize for Progress TowardResearch or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities. Wehave been looking for ways to draw greater attentionto the idea that progress in spiritual information andspiritual discoveries is just as feasible as progress inmedicine, science and cosmology. In fact, spiritualprogress may be more important than all of theseother areas. The name of the Prize was, therefore,changed to inspire greater attention to research ordiscoveries of a spiritual nature. Spiritual realities referto matters of the soul that are universal and apply in all cultures and to all people. These realities are non-material, transcendent or metaphysical areasabout which many people have intuitive perceptions.

The Prize is given each year in honor of a living personwho represents through his or her work a remarkablespirit of inquiry to understand not only the nature ofthese spiritual realities, but also the nature of thedivinity which gives life to these realities. The inquirycan come in many forms, including scientific researchor other methods of discovery by which knowledgemight compliment ancient scriptures and traditions in opening our eyes more fully to our growingunderstanding about God’s nature and purpose.

In highlighting his vision when he spoke with us herefour years ago, my Father said: “All of this pointstoward tremendous blessings for humanity and that is what I am devoting my life to. My challenge to

you is that if you want to be happy, if you want to beof benefit to humanity, you will not come up withanything more beneficial than new discoveries aboutspiritual realities including the nature of God and his purposes for us.”

That line of thinking explains why we are here today.Years ago my Father looked at the work of AlfredNobel and discovered that by giving five Prizes inChemistry, Physics, and so forth, he had persuadedthe most brilliant people on earth to devote a hugeamount of attention to discovery. Brilliant people whomight not otherwise have made these discoverieswere inspired by the fact that other people haddiscovered something important and were recognizedby winning one of his distinguished Prizes.Nevertheless, My Father felt that Alfred Nobel had ablind spot when it came to spiritual discovery. Hesaid: “I, therefore, established this Prize program toencourage an attitude of progress in the domain of

religion and also a spirit, even an enthusiasm, for aquest for discovery regarding spiritual realities. I feelthat this quest will have the most powerful andbeneficial impact in the whole realm of research anddiscoveries – an impact that will advance the wellbeing of each individual and the world as a whole.”

This spirit of inquiry and scholarly commitment ismost certainly demonstrated by the life’s work ofProfessor Charles Taylor and the impact that his workis having throughout the world.

2 32007 Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities

STATEMENT BY JOHN M. TEMPLETON, JR., M.D. Continued

John M. Templeton, Jr., congratulates Charles Taylor at the Templeton Prize Press Conference.

First, he has been an inspiring teacher. His teachinghas stimulated several generations of the world’sbrightest students. Many of these students havecome to McGill attracted by the political philosophyprogram that he founded, and which is renowned forthe rich intellectual debate which it encourages.Professor Taylor’s lectures on philosophy of action,political theory, moral philosophy, theories ofmeaning, language and politics, and on the culture ofwestern modernity have consistently been engagingand compelling and thought-provoking for all of hisstudents. Many of his students have gone on to playsignificant roles in guiding social policy and academicthought throughout the world.

The second pillar of his remarkable contribution hasbeen his outstanding scholarly inquiry. In discussing

STATEMENT BY

Mr. Michael E. GoldbloomVice-Principal, McGill University

AT THE TEMPLETON PRIZE PRESS CONFERENCE, NEW YORK CITY, MARCH 14, 2007

In the name of the Principal of McGill University,Heather Munroe-Blum, who unfortunately has to be in Europe, I would like to thank the Foundation for theopportunity to participate in this great moment, theannouncement of the Templeton Prize Laureate.

McGill University, as you can well understand, isdeeply honored that this distinguished Prize is to beawarded to Charles Taylor, emeritus professor ofphilosophy and highly esteemed member of theMcGill community for 45 years. Through his teaching,research, and service to the community, ProfessorTaylor has set an outstanding example of the waysthat a university professor can contribute to society at large. I’m going to try to illustrate a couple ofdimensions of this very quickly.

Before I introduce Professor Taylor, I want to welcome a few representatives of his university and his country, who will offer their congratulations. Mr. Michael Goldbloom is the Vice-Principalof McGill University, responsible for the university’s government relations and inter-institutionalaffairs. Four generations of his family have attended McGill, where Michael earned a Bachelor of Civil Law in 1978 and a Bachelor of Common Law in 1979. Before returning to McGill, Mr. Goldbloom was the publisher of the Toronto Star from 2003 to 2006, and publisher of theMontreal Gazette from 1994 to 2001. May I introduce to you, Mr. Michael Goldbloom.

INTRODUCTION BY JOHN M. TEMPLETON, JR., M.D.

I would like to say before reading my brief remarksthat it is truly an honor for me to be here today as the Québec Delegate General in New York asrepresentative of the Québec government to attendthis official announcement of the Prize-giving to ourdear fellow citizen, Dr. Charles Taylor.

The Government of Québec is both proud and gratefulthat the Templeton Prize has been awarded to Dr.Taylor, who without any doubt is one of the mostdistinguished philosophers of our time, and surelyQuébec’s best known philosopher worldwide.

I would also like to pay tribute to the TempletonFoundation and its research objective in the area of spirituality and for its leading role as a philanthropic organization.

As a Québecer I think that the complexity of theenvironment in which Dr. Taylor grew up helped insome way to shape his remarkable ability to reconcileideas and concepts that at first glance mightotherwise seem in complete opposition. Dr. Taylor’searly interest in questions of identity and his reflectionthereon may well have been spurred by his travel inQuébec set against the backdrop of modernity.

Even though there may be no direct connectionbetween them, Dr. Taylor’s main areas ofphilosophical inquiry have sometimes intersected

with key events in the history of Québec, mostnotably, the struggle between faith and reason.

Although Dr. Taylor has never called theEnlightenment into question, he has seen fit to saywhen enlightenment thinkers strayed off course.Human reason, and our confidence in the mind’scapacity to comprehend and change the world,ventures into the realm of arrogance when it pretendsto explain everything.

Recognizing and respecting the spiritual dimension ofhuman existence, this does help us to achieve ahealthy sense of humility, and this is a rare tribute foranyone who seeks a deeper understanding of theworld and its inhabitants in all their complexity.

Charles Taylor is all the more appealing because he isamong a small number of philosophers who havemaintained a steadfast commitment to civil societyand its attendant debates without sacrificing thedepth of their thinking. For instance, we trulyappreciate his tireless support to explain Québec toEnglish Canada and vice versa.

It is worth mentioning that in the 1960s his emphasison ethical commitment led Dr. Taylor to stand as afederal parliamentary candidate and to enter into adebate with one of Canada’s leading political figures,your friend Pierre Elliott Trudeau.


his philosophy of modernity, it has been said, and Iquote, that his contribution has been “to propose avision of a pluralistic society tolerant of valuessometimes contradictory between individual rightsand collective aspirations.” And, of course, ProfessorTaylor’s writings themselves have become a vast fieldof scholarly research.

The third pillar of his engagement has been hisengagement in broader society. He has givencountless public lectures reaching out to people

outside academia. He has been an effectivecommunicator to broad publics through his career as aradio, television, and print commentator on currentissues. I cite, as just one example, the Massey lectureseries carried nationally by the Canadian BroadcastingCorporation which was both a popular and criticalsuccess in our country. Professor Taylor also turnedhis political thought to active political engagementrunning as a candidate for public office. Now, happilyfor the University, the electors in their collectivewisdom voted to have him continue his academiccareer, and we’re all very grateful to them for that.Most recently, Professor Taylor accepted the Premierof Québec’s request that he co-preside a publiccommission on accommodation of cultural diversity inQuébec in order to help Québecers respond to one ofthe most critical issues facing our society.

Les qualités exceptionnelles du Pr Taylor sont nonseulement appréciées par ses pairs, mais elles ontégalement été reconnues officiellement. En effet,

le Pr Taylor est récipiendaire du prestigieux prix Léon-Gérin, lequel lui a été décerné enreconnaissance de sa contribution à la vieintellectuelle du Québec, et du prix Molson du Conseildes arts du Canada, lequel souligne son apportremarquable au patrimoine culturel canadien. Lestitres de grand officier de l’Ordre national du Québecet de compagnon de l’Ordre du Canada – les deuxhonneurs les plus élevés décernés aux citoyens - luiont également été conférés.

On a more personal note, I’d like to say that themarriage of Professor Taylor’s parents – SimoneBeaubien and Walter Margrave Taylor – was one ofthe most felicitous events in Canadian history.Charles’ sister, Gretta, who is here today, is the highlyregarded and much loved journalist and ChancellorEmerita of McGill University. I grew up with Grettaand Egan’s children, so for many years for me,Charles Taylor was simply their nice uncle Chuck, a role he played with the same warmth and humanity and wisdom that he’s brought to everyother facet of his life.

So on behalf of McGill, I would like to say that we aregrateful to the John Templeton Foundation for thisunique Prize recognizing the importance of spiritualityin our lives. I’d like to thank Charles Taylor for hisoutstanding contributions to advancing ourunderstanding of our world, for sharing his insightswith students, colleagues and society, and mostimportantly for his profound and inspiring humanity.Thank you.

4

STATEMENT BY

Mr. Michel RobitailleDelegate General, Québec Government Office, New York

AT THE TEMPLETON PRIZE PRESS CONFERENCE, NEW YORK CITY, MARCH 14, 2007

Now it is my pleasure to introduce Mr. Michel Robitaille, Delegate General of the QuébecGovernment Office in New York. Mr. Robitaille was appointed to this top-ranking U.S. position inAugust 2002. He is responsible for relations with eight states and Washington, D.C. We are mosthonored by his presence here today. Mr. Robitaille, we welcome your comments.

“I’d like to thank Charles Taylor for his outstandingcontributions to advancing our understanding of the world,for sharing his insights with students, colleagues and society,and most importantly for his profound and inspiring humanity.”

STATEMENT BY MICHAEL E. GOLDBLOOM Continued



Now I would like to briefly share with you some ofthe extraordinary background and lifetime work ofProfessor CharlesTaylor.

Many of the details of his accomplishments arehighlighted in the Press Package which you havereceived. Let me take a few moments, however, tohighlight some of his remarkable life’s work, whichclearly caught the attention of the judges in theirselection of him as this year’s winner.

Charles Taylor is Professor of Law and Philosophy atNorthwestern University and Emeritus Professor ofPolitical Science and Philosophy at McGill Universityin Montreal, Québec. He was raised in a bilingualEnglish-French family in Québec, which from an earlyage, gave him a deep sense of the relationship oflanguage and culture. In his extraordinary career, he took first class honors at McGill University inhistory in 1952, which was followed by his selectionas a Rhodes Scholar with a first class degree inphilosophy, politics and economics. His perspectives,however, even at that stage, were very much affectedby a sense he developed at about 15 years of age ofwhat he described as “the power of God.”

Subsequently, he achieved distinction through hisdoctor of philosophy thesis at Oxford which wassubsequently published as his first major workentitled, The Explanation of Behavior.

The briefest reviews of his extraordinary curriculumvitae demonstrate rapid academic progress back at McGill University leading to his dual status of fullprofessor in the departments of both political science

and philosophy. Through his prolific writings, hebecame widely sought as a visiting professor, lecturer and fellow at 18 different institutions.

In addition to receiving 13 awards, including theDistinguished Companion of the Order of Canada, he became a member and fellow of eight eminentsocieties from five different nations includingselection as a Fellow of the British Academy.

As already noted, his productivity as a writer andscholar have been prodigious. He has written andpublished 23 books – soon to be 24 books – many of which have been translated into 22 differentlanguages. This is a reflection of the truly globalimpact of his life’s work. Added to this extraordinaryproductivity are over 170 peer review articles onsubjects including nationalism, cause and action,materialism, meaning and purpose, justice and virtue,human agency, and faith and reason.

But what is of greatest significance regardingProfessor Taylor extends beyond the depth andbreadth of his work. His significance is best seen inthe content of his writings and lectures. Reviewershave called him one of the most exemplary polymathsof our age. Many of the prior Templeton PrizeLaureates have been distinguished winners of theGifford Lectureship, as was Professor Taylor. In 1998and 1999, Professor Taylor delivered his lecturesentitled, “Living in a Secular Age” at the University of Edinburgh. Past Gifford lecturers often produced asingle volume based on their lectureship. In ProfessorTaylor’s case, however, the framework for his Gifford

More recently, at the Québec premier’s request, Mr. Taylor agreed to co-chair a committee exploringthe question of reasonable accommodation. Theobjective is to establish guidelines clarifying the extentto which civil society should be expected to adapt to its citizens’ religious requirements. This is a localdebate with, no doubt, universal resonance.

In our times, Charles Taylor, a man who is adept atreconciling collective and individual rights, identity andmodernity, faith and reason, is among a select groupof intellectuals in which the world is of great need. Dr. Taylor, you have made a remarkable contribution to Québec society. All Québecers share the joy of the honor that has been conferred upon you today.Thank you very much.

6

I’m delighted to have this opportunity to congratulateProfessor Charles Taylor on winning the 2007Templeton Prize. Professor Taylor, you are the firstCanadian to win this very important award in its 35-year history. Your career has been an extraordinaryone, spanning over 50 years, and your work toucheson so many areas of study, from philosophy, the law,from political science to history.

Not only are your interests broad, but your workcrosses so many boundaries, between academicdisciplines, between concepts of nationhood, culturalidentities, and religious beliefs.

You encourage us to look beyond the obvious, beyond the accepted frames of reference, and you

inspire us to develop a deeper understanding ofourselves, of what we know, and our relationshipswith others.

You are beloved by your students, crowded into thelecture halls on McGill’s campus, and by peoplearound the world who treasure your writings.

Professor Taylor, as Canadians, we’re proud to callyou one of our own, to celebrate this great honorbestowed on you today. As Canada’s officialrepresentative here in New York and on behalf of thePrime Minister of Canada, I congratulate ProfessorTaylor on winning the 2007 Templeton Prize.Professor Taylor, you make us very proud asCanadians. Thank you.

STATEMENT BY

Mr. Daniel SullivanConsul General of Canada in New York

AT THE TEMPLETON PRIZE PRESS CONFERENCE, MARCH 14, 2007

Thank you Mr. Robitaille. And now it is my pleasure to introduce Mr. Daniel Sullivan,Consul General of Canada in New York. After a 38-year banking career, all of it withScotia Bank, Daniel Sullivan was appointed last year as Consul General of Canada inNew York by the Canadian government. Please join me in welcoming Canada’s officialrepresentative to New York, Consul General Daniel Sullivan.

Professor Taylor has helped to increase understanding of whatreligious belief is, and how it can be shaped toward a created future in which new knowledge will be possible.

STATEMENT BY MR. MICHEL ROBITAILLE Continued


STATEMENT BY JOHN M. TEMPLETON, JR, M.D. continued

92007 Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities 8

lectures resulted in three different volumes includingVarieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited,Modern Social Imaginaries, and this year, his mostsignificant publication entitled, A Secular Age, to bepublished by Harvard University Press.

Speaking on behalf of my Father, Sir John Templetonand the Templeton Prize Program, we are deeplygrateful that the Reverend Dr. David Martin, himself a leading scholar of religion in a secular culture,nominated Professor Taylor for consideration by theTempleton Prize judges.

Reverend Dr. Martin, in making his nomination,identified Professor Taylor as the leading contributor in the conversation between religion and the socialsciences. Professor Taylor has been described as“one of the greatest social thinkers in the English-speaking world in our era,” especially in regard to hiseloquent and acute analysis of the spiritual crisis ofmodernity. The Professor’s main contribution hasbeen to new knowledge in religion – precisely in the way in which religious belief and practice is anessential part of wider cultural history. In his citationfor nomination of Professor Taylor, Reverend Dr.Martin said that Professor Taylor’s “latest summa, A Secular Age, provides a magisterial overview of therelations between religion, secular humanism andscience as no one else has attempted, or perhapscould attempt.” The citation went on to say, “Inparticular, it draws out the special character of the last 500 years and the fragility now attendant on allpositions whether secularist or religious.”

In conclusion, the judges for the Templeton Prizerecognized the importance of Professor Taylor’s life’s work in his raising the important distinctionbetween the human sciences and the naturalsciences and his stress on the necessity of taking

human consciousness and personhood seriously in its fullest social context. Professor Taylor has helpedto increase understanding of what religious belief is, and how it can be shaped toward a created future in which new knowledge will be possible. In warningagainst the danger of social scientists becomingimpoverished if their research continues to be guidedby an orientation to avoid value-relatedness, ProfessorTaylor’s style of thinking and argumentation ischaracterized more by an impulse toward integrationrather than polarization. His continuing work pushesforward the common boundaries of philosophy andthe social sciences with respect to the history, future dynamics and manifestations of the spirit ofGod and man.

Please join me then in welcoming Professor CharlesTaylor, the 2007 Templeton Prize Laureate, as hesteps to the podium to share his remarks with us.

Michel Robitaille, Charles Taylor, John M. Templeton, Jr., and Daniel Sullivan at the Templeton Prize Press Conference.

STATEMENT BY

Prof. Charles TaylorAT THE TEMPLETON PRIZE PRESS CONFERENCE, NEW YORK CITY, MARCH 14, 2007

Thank you very much, Dr. Templeton, and distinguished members of thispanel here for your remarks. I have to say I feel once more the sense ofbeing overwhelmed that I experienced when I first heard of receiving thisPrize which I didn’t even know I could be a possible candidate for.

But I can see and I understand now the thinkingbehind the judges and the people in the Foundationand I’m very deeply honored by this. I feel such asense of being overwhelmed and very humbled aboutthis that I sometimes have trouble seeing myself inthese glowing descriptions. But I certainly think thatwhat has been described here is something that I’ve tried to do. Let me try to describe very quicklyhow I’ve been trying.

We talk here about spiritual discovery and that beingput as an analogy to scientific discovery in chemistry,physics, and so on. I think it may be better to say, in part, spiritual rediscovery because there is atremendous capacity in human life to forget thingsthat we somehow deep down knew. And of course a lot of great philosophers from Plato on have talkedabout this extensively and, in a sense, the 20th centuryphilosopher, Heidegger, speaks of forgetfulness ofbeing. I think there is a kind of forgetfulness we fallinto and in particular there are a set of forgettings thatare very central to the modern world.

In a sense the modern world, and what we call thesecular world, has led, among other things, to peoplewanting to forget certain answers to the questions oflife. There has been a rebellion in certain areas againstreligion in my own home society in Québec, and atremendous rebellion in the 1960s, and a greatrejection by many people of the Catholic faith and the church. That hasn’t happened everywhere, butthings like that have happened elsewhere.

So certain answers have been totally rejected. Butwhat is really dangerous is to forget the questions. In a certain sense, what I’ve been trying to say issomething like this. Human beings, whether theyadmit it or not, live in a space of questions, very deepquestions. What is the meaning of life, what is ahigher mode of life, a lower mode of life, what isreally worthwhile, what is the basis of the dignity thatI’m trying to define for myself, the hunger to be reallyon the side of the good and the right, in popular termsto be part of the solution and not part of the problem,and I can mention many others. These are deephungers or searches or questions that people areasking all the time.

And the basic thesis that I have been offering on thiscould sound very crazy and wrong to some people,but I really think it’s the truth. Everybody exists in thisspace of questions whether they recognize it or not.They may not think they’ve been posing or solvingthe question of the meaning of life, but, being ahuman being, that has to get to you at some level and you have to be living an answer to that, whetheryou recognize that or not.

And I think one of the really important rules of humanscience is to bring this out and to bring out very oftenthe inarticulate answers that people are living. That’swhy we need another understanding of reason. It’snot simply moving deductively through an argument,it’s also being able to give voice and articulate someof these very deep-lived positions of people and bringthem out to the surface. Why do this? I could say,

STATEMENT BY JOHN M. TEMPLETON, JR., M.D. Continued


Charles Taylor at the Templeton Prize Press Conference.

’Socrates, come here and tell us again the unexaminedlife isn’t worth living.’ I think that’s part of it, but also I think it’s terribly damaging if we forget thesequestions because a lot of the things that happen inour world have happened because people haveanswered them in a certain way.

I’ve talked about this in the last few days. A lot of the violence we see in our world today comes whenyoung people are recruited to certain causes whichmake them do really horrifying killings. And whatrecruits them is some offer, some supposed offer, of a real sense of meaning to their lives. They may be living in a stage of unemployment or they see nofuture or they have no sense of dignity, and they getthese answers. They may not think of themselves ashaving answered a question but they have answereda question and of course in this case answered it in a terribly destructive and self-destructive way.

But unless we see that they’re working in that spaceof questions, like all of us, we won’t know whythey’re doing it, we won’t know what to do to maybeconvince them to find another answer to this. We just will be helpless. I don’t really call Socrates to my support here, in pleading that these are importantquestions, but we have to bring them up, we needactually to live in our world in a way that we canultimately establish some way of peace and comityand understanding with each other.

Although this is a kind of leap, if you like, of scientificfaith to begin with, that we have to understandhumans on this level, I really am very convinced of it.It’s my trying to bring this up and put it forward that I think is the great affinity that I have with the goals of the Templeton Foundation.

I must say just one more thing. I have tremendouslybenefited from work with others in various networks

which have been discussing this, because this is the kind of issue you can’t solve within one singlediscipline. You have to bring in people from a wholeset of disciplines. I feel at this moment howtremendously I owe a lot of what I am able to say to a whole set of networks.

And of course, et, Michel Rutin l’a mentionné, c’estma vie au Québec, dans une famille un peu double,un peu entre deux solitudes. C’est ma vie au Québecdans toutes les grandes questions qui se sont poséesà nous. C’est ça qui a alimenté, dès le très bas âgewhich has given me a sense from a very young ageof a sense of importance of these questions. So I feela tremendous debt to McGill and to all the groups andthe movements and the networks that have made itpossible for me to stand here today and give mythanks for this tremendous honor that you’ve doneme. Thank you very much.

PREPARED STATEMENT BY

Prof. Charles TaylorFOR THE TEMPLETON PRIZE PRESS CONFERENCE, NEW YORK CITY, MARCH 14, 2007

I want to say first how deeply honoured I am to be chosen for the Templeton Prize. I believe that the goal Sir John Templeton haschosen is of the greatest contemporary importance and relevance: we have somehow to break down the barriers between our contemporaryculture of science and disciplined academic study (what the Germansgather in the term “Wissenschaft”) on one hand, and the domain of spirit, on the other.

This has been one of the driving goals of my ownintellectual work, and to have it recognized as suchfills me with an unstable mixture of joy and humility.

Sir John has seen, I believe, that the barriers betweenscience and spirituality are not only ungrounded, but are also crippling. They impede crucial furtherinsight. This case has been eloquently argued by thephysicists, biologists and cosmologists who havebeen awarded the prize in recent years. But I feel that now a further step is being taken. The divorce of natural science and religion has been damaging toboth; but it is equally true that the culture of thehumanities and social sciences has often beensurprisingly blind and deaf to the spiritual, and that in my case, the attempt to break down these barriersis being recognized and honoured.

The deafness of many philosophers, social scientistsand historians to the spiritual dimension can beremarkable. And this is the more damaging in that it affects the culture of the media and of educatedpublic opinion in general. I take a striking case, astatement, not admittedly by a social scientist, but by a Nobel Laureate cosmologist, Steven Weinberg. I take it, because I find that it is often repeated in the media and in informal argument. Weinberg said (I quote from memory): “there are good people whodo good things, and bad people who do bad things,but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.”

On one level, it is astonishing that anyone who livedthrough a good part of the twentieth century couldsay something like this. What are we to make ofthose noble, well-intentioned Bolsheviks, Marxistmaterialist atheists to a man (and occasional woman),who ended up building one of the most oppressiveand murderous brace of regimes in human history?When people quote this phrase to me, or someequivalent, and I enter this objection, they often reply,“but Communism was a religion,” a reply whichshifts the goal-posts and upsets the argument.

But it’s worth pondering for a minute what lies behindthis move. The “Weinberg principle,” if I might usethis term, is being made tautologically true, becauseany set of beliefs which can induce decent people,who would never kill for personal gain, to murder forthe cause, is being defined as “religion.” “Religion” is being defined as the murderously irrational.

Pretty sloppy thinking. But it is also crippling. Whatthe speaker is really expressing is something like this:the terrible violence of the twentieth century hasnothing to do with right-thinking, rational, enlightenedpeople like me. The argument is then joined on theother side by certain believers who point out thatHitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc., were all enemies ofreligion, and feel that good Christians like me have nopart in such horrors. This conveniently forgets theCrusades, the Inquisition, and much else.

STATEMENT BY PROF. CHARLES TAYLOR Continued

Both sides need to be wrenched out of theircomplacent dream, and see that no-one, just in virtueof having the right beliefs, is immune from beingrecruited to group violence: from the temptation totarget another group which is made responsible for all our ills, from the illusion of our own purity whichcomes from our readiness to combat this evil forcewith all our might. We urgently need to understandwhat makes whole groups of people ready to beswept up into this kind of project.

But in fact, we have only a very imperfect grasp onthis. Some of our most insightful scholars, like RenéGirard, or Sudhir Kakar, have studied it. Great writers,like Dostoevsky, have cast great light on it, but itremains still mysterious. What is equally imperfectlyunderstood is the way in which charismatic spiritualleadership, of a Gandhi, a Mandela, a Tutu, can bringpeople back from the brink.

But without this kind of spiritual initiative, the best-intentioned efforts to put human history on a new,and more humane footing, have often turned thishistory into a slaughter bench, in Hegel’s memorablephrase. It is a sobering thought that Robespierre, in the first discussions on the new revolutionaryconstitution for France, voted against the death penalty.Yet the path to this peaceable republic, which wouldspare the lives of even its worst criminals, somehowled through the nightmare of the Terror.

We urgently need new insight into the humanpropensity for violence, and following the authors I mentioned above, this cannot be a reductivesociobiological one, but must take full account of thehuman striving for meaning and spiritual direction, ofwhich the appeals to violence are a perversion. Butwe don’t even begin to see where we have to look aslong as we accept the complacent myth that peoplelike us (enlightened secularists, or believers) are notpart of the problem. We will pay a high price if weallow this kind of muddled thinking to prevail.

I’ve taken this example, of group violence and itssupposed explanations, because it is so obviouslyraises urgent questions in our world. But the barriersbetween our social sciences and the spiritualdimension of life are crippling in a whole host of otherways as well. I have recently been working on theissue of what we mean in describing our presentcivilization in the West as “secular.” For a long time,in mainstream sociology this development was takenas unproblematic and inevitable. Certain of thefeatures of modernity: economic development,urbanization, rising mobility, higher educational levels,were seen as inevitably bringing about a decline inreligious belief and practice. This was the famous“secularization thesis.” For a long time, this viewdominated thinking in social science and history. More recent events have shaken this conviction, even among mainstream scholars.


PREPARED STATEMENT BY PROF. CHARLES TAYLOR Continued

But well before this revision occurred, a minority ofscholars were already turning the theory inside out. In particular, David Martin in his epochal, GeneralTheory of Secularization. The main thrust of this work, and of others who have followed, is thatsecularization theory was not just factually wrong. It also misconceived the whole process.

It was indeed, true that the various facets ofmodernization destabilized older, traditional forms ofreligious life; but new forms were always being re-invented, and some of these took on tremendousimportance. David Martin has traced the developmentof new congregational forms through Methodism, and

various waves of revival in the United States, throughthe birth of Pentacostal forms about a century ago,which are now spreading with great speed in all partsof the globe. Equally far-reaching changes have occurredin Catholic Churches in many parts of the world.

Breaking out of the old intellectual mould opens up a whole new field of great importance: What are thenew forms of religion which are developing in theWest? And what relation do they have to those whichare growing elsewhere, in Asia, Africa, Latin America?This is part of what I am trying to study in my work,drawing on the pioneering analyses of David Martin,on the writings of Robert Bellah, and on the recentwork of younger sociologists, like José Casanova and Hans Joas.

Some of these forms, like those in which religion or confessionality becomes the basis of a quasi-nationalist political mobilization, have obviouslyassumed immense, even threatening proportions in our day. We urgently need to understand theirdynamic, their benefits and dangers, an area that theold framework of secularization theory hid from sight.In this domain too, John Templeton’s insight turns outto be valid, a blindness to the spiritual dimension ofhuman life makes us incapable of exploring issueswhich are vital to our lives. Or to turn it around andstate the positive: bringing the spiritual back in opensdomains in which important and even excitingdiscoveries become possible.

I am happy to be engaged in this work, among anumber of others: the sociologists I mentioned above,and some philosophers, like Alasdair MacIntyre. I sense in this Prize awarded to me a recognition not only of my work but of this collective effort. Thisawakens powerful, if somewhat confused emotions:joy, pride, and a sense of inadequacy mingle together.But above all I feel the great satisfaction of knowingthat this whole area of work will acquire a highersaliency through the award of this Prize; and I feel the most heartfelt gratitude to Sir John and to theTempleton Foundation.

I sense in this Prize awarded to me a recognition not only of my work but of this collective effort. This awakens powerful, if somewhat confused emotions: joy, pride, and a sense of inadequacy mingle together.

Professor Charles Taylor in New York City.

2007 Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities 14 15

PRESENTATION OF THE

2007 Templeton PrizeAT BUCKINGHAM PALACE, LONDON, MAY 2, 2007


The Duke of Edinburgh with Charles Taylor and his family and friends at the Buckingham Palace ceremony.

The Duke of Edinburgh, Charles Taylor, and his wife Aube Billard Taylor, at Buckingham Palace.

On that note, please join me in one more round of applause and a warm expression of gratitude to our 2007 Templeton Prize Laureate, Professor Charles Taylor.

We look forward to seeing you here in New York Cityfor our next Templeton Prize News Conference in2008. Thank you very much.

I also want to close with a special request from myFather. First, he would like to suggest that anyonehere, or watching our webcast, or anyone who learnsabout the Prize and this year’s Prize Laureate, CharlesTaylor, to please contact us with ideas or suggestionsyou might have for improving the Prize program and,in particular, its outreach and impact.

Secondly, my Father would like to urge you or anyoneyou know to submit new nominations of individualswho have made singular accomplishments in thebroad area of research and discoveries about spiritualrealities. You can learn more about the TempletonPrize program and the criteria for applications by goingto our Website, www.templetonprize.org.

CLOSING STATEMENT BY

John M. Templeton, Jr., M.D.AT THE TEMPLETON PRIZE PRESS CONFERENCE, NEW YORK CITY, MARCH 14, 2007

Again, I would like to warmly thank each and every one of you for attending this news conference this morning and for sharing your thoughts and questions.


I would like to welcome everyone very warmly to thisvery celebratory occasion. The Academy is delightedto be the place for a gathering of many of CharlesTaylor’s friends and admirers from many parts of theworld, and across many years, on the occasion inwhich he has been awarded the most amazing prize,thanks to the foresight and vision of the TempletonFoundation. I’m going to delegate to Charles Harper,on behalf of the Foundation to tell you a bit about theFoundation and the Prize.

The order in which we’ll then go forward will be thatfive commentators will speak about Charles Taylor’slatest book, and the only difference to the way it isprinted in the card is that Professor Kolakowski willcome number three rather than number one in theorder. Each speaker will speak for up to ten minutes.They’re not required to hit their ten minutes! At theend I will ask Charles to speak about the thoughtsthat the occasion has raised for him.

So once again, a very warm welcome and I’m nowgoing to hand over to Charles Harper to talk a little bitabout the Foundation and the Prize.

WELCOME BY

Baroness O’NeillPresident, The British Academy

Panel and audience at the British Academy.

A Conversation with 2007 Templeton Prize Laureate Charles TaylorAT THE BRITISH ACADEMY, LONDON, MAY 2, 2007

Thank you Baroness O’Neill, my name is CharlesHarper, not Charles Taylor. I know we all want to getto the meat of this occasion, so my remarks will beextremely brief.

This morning Charles Taylor was awarded theTempleton Prize in a private ceremony by Prince Philip in Buckingham Palace. Speaking for theJohn Templeton Foundation, we’re deeply grateful tothe British Academy for its gracious partnership inmaking this event possible, to allow many Fellows ofthe Academy and special guests to convene tocelebrate Charles Taylor being honored today, and todo so by engaging with his present work. In particular,

the forthcoming book, A Secular Age, to be publishedby Harvard University Press in September. The editorof Harvard University Press, Lindsay Waters, hascome over to participate in this event.

The Templeton Prize recognizes vitally important andsignificant contributions to scholarship at the interfacebetween research, here philosophical and socialscientific in the spiritual quest of humanity, especiallythrough scholarly reflections, analysis andphilosophical, theological and scientific inquiry. This event, in this most distinguished institution andcompany here gathered together exemplifies thisvision and doubtless will be most stimulating. Again,we’re deeply grateful for this partnership with theBritish Academy to allow many friends, and interestedscholars to engage in this publication that will soonbe, when it’s published, a major discussion in ourwider culture, so I thank you again.

INTRODUCTION BY

Charles L. Harper, Jr., D.Phil.Senior Vice President, John Templeton Foundation

Charles L. Harper, Jr., D.Phil.


Professor David Martin

I have to go right back to Weber and Jaspers on theform of transcendence adopted by the world religions,in particular Christianity and Buddhism. Theytranscend the world as it is, and project a universalvision of a peaceable Kingdom, either to come hereon Earth in due time, or timelessly in an inner nirvana.This vision requires disinterested self-offering, notself-assertion or self-expression. In its Christian form,especially in the Latin West, it generates the idea of a non-violent power, not of this world but of the spirit,and thus, of a resistant secular space ruled by thepowers that be. Response of these powers, includingcrucially the regimen of violence, is to co-opt thepower of the spirit, only to find themselves hauntedby a spiritual doppelganger, the delayed hope of a

It is spiritually informed and informing because ittouches on all the horizons of hope and anxiety in the world. It also bridges the disjunction betweenaccounts, in terms of genealogies of ideas, thosebased on types of secular formation and thosefocused on all the varied empirical patterns ofreligious belonging.

Charles Taylor shows how an early modern anduniquely western world view, based on the autonomyof the immanent, not only inheres in the process ofsecularisation but, in its closed or dogmatic version,mandates it universally. Yet, it’s clear that one sizedoes not fit all, and he suggests, moreover, that wecan opt for an open as well as a closed version, eventhough the autonomy of the immanent world clearlydefines what secularisation is all about. My questionwill be how far the particular version of immanenceassociated with empirical science and its philosophicalexpression in positivism is the driving force behind ourcontemporary secular practice.

As a sociologist influenced by the hermeneutictradition, I agree with Charles Taylor about therelatively meagre yield of positivist empiricism in thehuman sciences. Yet most sociologists, includingthose in the positivist tradition, do not accord crucialweight to the direct impact of science or of empiricalscientific method in their theories of secularisation.They may rather stress social-structural changes and the advance of technical reason, and maybe the relation of religion to political power. This relationto power informs my own work, and is the mainorganising principle of what I’m now going to say.

COMMENTS BY

Professor David MartinEmeritus Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics

A Secular Age is a modern formation of a complete intellectuallandscape. Within the coordinates of the religious and the secular and the immanent and the transcendent, Charles Taylor has providedus with a series of related projections, enabling us to locate ourselves in Western thinking, in particular over the last 500 years.

inner-self at the expense of collective redemption, andsecond, it converts self-offering into self-expression.This gives rise to a tension between an understandingof the self in terms of sincerity, spontaneity,authenticity and the inherent requirements of socialorder, cosmic, or otherwise, in terms of authority,internalised discipline, ritual and courtesy. Socialinstitutions, including the church, become identifiedwith oppressive structures and unacceptabledemands, including long-term commitments. The spirit wanders at will under the impulse of

unappeasable desire. This epiphany of the self isincapable of recognising the structural realities ofpolitics exposed by Machiavelli and recognised byChristianity under the code name of “sin.” In all this, in particular my use of semi-secular, I echoCharles Taylor’s insight into the way themes from thereligious repertoire work away just below the surface,without their Christian names or their Jewish namesbeing recognised.

What is the net result? In much of Eastern Europeand Russia neo-Durkheimian formations have returnedin the form of ethno-religious nationalism. In the USAand France, a neo-Durkheimian civic nationalism,religious and laic respectively, is in some tension withthe turn to the self. That turn is now widespreadthroughout Western Europe as a whole and appearsas a homeless spirituality. Self-centred anti-nomianismtook off in the elite in the two decades before theFirst World War, expanded in the inter-war period and reached the popular level through the youthculture of the sixties and thereafter. However, an anti-nomianism of the self is just one element in amelange of which immanent empiricism is simply

peaceful advent, or the anxiety of an apocalypticsecond coming. Putting it in that way underlines theinterest Charles and I share about the partly hiddensources of peace and violence.

I will call the regimen of violence “the secularpractice.” Its brutal logic remained under-theoriseduntil Machiavelli, and we can treat its exposure by himas the first great secularisation in the social world. Itruns in conjunction with another secularisation, theon-set of scientific naturalism or mechanism in the

natural world, in particular the mechanical clock timediscussed by Charles Taylor. In social time, however,there is only a partial secularisation of religious ages into philosophical stages. The carriers are theenlightened absolutism of the state, mutating intoenlightened civic or romantic ethnic nationalism, and,the party. These carriers co-opt the church, Englishstyle, displace it, French style, or disestablish it, as inAmerica. Whichever option is adopted, nation andparty alike represent the kind of collective socialsolidarity that Charles Taylor labels neo-Durkheimian.In nation as in party there is an uneasy co-existencebetween a mechanistic empirical science, particularlyas manifested in clock time, and a semi-secularisedhuman hope of eternal peace or anxiety ofapocalypse, achievable if necessary by a semi-secularversion of divine judgment and exemplary violence.

Running in parallel with this and drawingreinforcement from the Reformation there is a turn tothe inner self, given classic formulation by CharlesTaylor which semi-secularises the church forredemption in two ways. First, it locates the pursuit offullness, redemption and paradise in the depths of the

“My question will be how far the particular version of immanence associated with empirical science and its philosophical expression in positivism is the driving force behind our contemporary secular practice.”


I suppose the paradigmatic expression of that projectmight be found in Ernest Gellner’s combination ofrationalist empiricism and moral utilitarianism which ineveryday life shows itself as a semi-reflective secularpractice. The scientific mode of operation according to the austere protocols of the philosophy of scienceis rather rare, and even some of those who claim torepresent the scientific approach in the public forumignore its procedures to engage in prophetic andmoralistic denunciation of religion as the main sourceof all our woes, above all, of violence. These prophetsfollow an old enlightenment tradition, locatingviolence, in particular social formations, whichtherefore need to be dispatched from human history.

Charles Taylor has commented that the tactic ofturning a blind eye to the terrible tally of secularistviolence, or, illegitimately extending the definition ofreligion to cover every kind of violent fanaticismconstitutes a false claim to purity and innocence. If that style dominates the highest level of publicdebate, what is the precise regulatory power, thestrict scientific writ, in our contemporary Westernsociety, let alone elsewhere?

Charles Taylor locates the power of the materialistscientific picture in terms of certain values implicit inthe immanent frame, notably disengaged reason andhuman agency which are spun to create a closed-worldsystem. I try to offer a supporting argument focusedon a horizon of hope and anxiety in relation to the selfand politics likewise derived at one remove from LatinChristendom, the legitimation for which cannot becontained in, or derived from, the immanent frame.Thank you.

another. At least three modes interpenetrate: thepower of natural and social science in remaking theworld, the power of the people expressed in nation or party, and the power of the self, especially asexpressed in education, art and creativity. TheAdventist and apocalyptic aspects of thesedevelopments hardly conform to the strict scientificattitude. In the world of political parties, for example,there is the recurrent hope of a charismatic politicalmessiah who becomes corrupted by the sombrereality of political practice, whereupon the people lookfor another, to restore the pristine political kingdom.That has been as true of France and Britain as of thevarious orange and velvet revolutions in EasternEurope. Once again we see the religious repertoire at work under the surface.

So what is my argument? We talk of the liberal elitedominating the cultural discourse of the centralisedpolities of Western Europe. These elites promote animage of themselves as dedicated to the scientificideal, whereas in practice they’re dedicated to anunstable combination of the Adventism of thecollective and of the self. If we look at the history of philosophy over the last century it moves fromidealism to positivism with an existentialist interlude in atheistic and religious forms and then constrivism,likewise in atheistic and religious forms. Continentalphilosophy, phenomenological, hermeneutic, Hegelian is similarly religious and non-religious, but, as Charles Taylor indicates, it can upend thewhole empirical project.

assertions and generalisations of the advocates of the usual secularisation thesis. Unlike the advocatesof secularisation thesis, Taylor refuses to take ahomogeneous and uniform view of religion. He appreciates that religion appears in new and non-traditional forms and different historical epochsand is not just a matter of what you believe and whatyou practice. Taylor is not content to tell the storyfrom 1500 onwards. He also goes on to comment, I think in an extremely insightful manner, on the moral predicament of our times, as well as on whathe takes to be some of the important blind spots of Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity. He argues, I think rightly, that Christianity has sufferedfrom its inadequate appreciation of the human body,and its disassociation of the erotic impulse from the love of God.

He also argues that its exclusive claim to truth hasprevented it from opening itself up to a dialogue withother religions and civilisations. Similarly he goes onto show how much of our moral life today is reducedto rules, and suffers from what he called code-fetishismor nomolatry, which reminded me of MichaelOakeshott’s and Friedrich Hayek’s expression,“Nomocracy.” So a moral life is a form of nomolatry,the worship of norms and rules, and misses out notonly on character and virtues as they have beenemphasised by others, like Geller himself andMacIntyre, but also on the deeper dimensions of loveof our fellow human beings and seeing morality, notmerely as a way of relating to other people but also as a form of expressing oneself and living out a certain kind of life.

Today we live in a society in which such a belief is justone option amongst several and not easy to embrace.Or, to put it slightly differently, society was oncegrounded in the sacred. Human selves were seen asporous and open to the influence of spiritual forces.Secular time was embedded in higher times and thedrama of human life unfolded within a structured andmeaningful cosmos. None of this is the case withmodern society.

Charles Taylor’s basic problem is how did this comeabout, and what have we lost, or gained as a result of it? Taylor concentrates on the Euro-Atlantic worldand the lack in Christianity. The story that he tells, ofwhat happened between 1500 and now, is extremelysubtle and complex, and free from the simplistic

COMMENTS BY

Lord ParekhProfessor, Centre for the Study of Global Governance, London School of Economics

Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age is an extremely rich and profound book and it addresses an important problem, broadly formulated in the following terms: Until around 1500 it was virtually impossible not to believe in God.

Lord Parekh

COMMENTS BY PROF. DAVID MARTIN Continued


Now, it is not easy to say whether these are secularviews of the world, or religious. In fact, I’m remindedhere of a wonderful dialogue between Hindu punditsand Christian missionaries in the eighteenth, earlynineteenth century. When the Christian missionaryasked the Hindu pundits, “Do you believe in one Godor many?” their immediate answer was that thequestion is absurd and blasphemous. Absurd becauseit’s like if I was to ask you, “Is air one or many?” youwould say the question is absurd. So the question ofwhether you believe in one God or many presupposesthat God is a person or at least some form of being.But if God is understood as energy, how? Then thequestion makes no sense at all and is blasphemousbecause quantitative predicates cannot be attributedto God anymore than qualitative or empirical.

Now in that kind of real thinking, God, if that’s theword that we want to use, because the word itself israther problematic, is some form of transcendentalprinciple if one wants to use that kind of word. In theHindu example I have just given, it becomes verydifficult to make sense of this distinction betweenimmanence and transcendence. Even when thediscussion is limited to Christianity one could takeseveral views. One could argue in the manner ofIsaiah Berlin, for example, that secular and religiousworld views are incommensurable and that onecommits oneself to one or the other. A decisioncannot be based on rational deliberations, it’s a matterof ultimate commitment. Or secondly, one couldargue, as I would like to do and have argued, thatsecular and religious views are different, eachcontains insights and sensibilities lacking in the otherand therefore they can benefit from each other,without ever becoming one. Or, there is a thirdpossibility, for which Charles Taylor opts, from time to time, in addition to taking the second view, and Isee echoes of this in Charles. He also seems to thinkthat the secular view is incoherent and points to thereligious. In other words there is a distinctly Hegelianattempt to show that the secular view is aufgehoben

I think that all this is absolutely fascinating, and sinceI’m not brought in here simply to say how wonderfulthe book is, what I’m going to do is raise a fewquestions. I think a book of this kind raises severalquestions. Is Taylor’s way of formulating his basicproblem correct and helpful? This is what happened in1500, or before 1500, and this is what has happenedsince. Is this a correct way, or very helpful way offormulating the problem? Is his conception oftranscendence, because this is one importantconcept, and the distinction between transcendenceand immanence ultimately satisfactory (because thatunderpins the book)? Thirdly, is his historical accountaccurate and does it take account of major forces, not only intellectual currents and modes of self-understanding, but economic, political, colonial andother encounters that the West had? Have they playedan important part in shaping the world in which we live?

There are all kinds of questions, and what I want todo is concentrate on just one cluster of questions.Charles Taylor contrasts the secular and religiousviews of the world. The way that he draws thedistinction makes sense within the Christian context.I’m not entirely sure it makes the same amount ofsense in relation to Buddhism, about which he knowsfar more than I do, or Hinduism, or other traditionalreligions of the East. These religions, such as majorcurrents in Hinduism like Advaita, or Buddhism orJainism, they stress spirituality but deny the existenceof God. Remember, the universe is supposed to beeternal and therefore God doesn’t come in in any way as creating or regulating the universe. Theyconcentrate on the individual self and the aim is toshow how the self is constituted, bounded, buildswalls around itself, and becomes the source ofsuffering and violence. Their concern is to show, notthrough prayer or rituals of any kind, but by intellectualunderstanding, how the self can be loosened up,opened up itself to the presence of others, includingnature, and become one, which is what it called thestate of nirvana.

and lots of other things. Now why is the love ofgoodness not enough? That’s the kind of argumentthat Plato makes. Why should we be locatinggoodness in some notion of transcendence or god?And I would certainly like to be educated on this.

There is another subject to which Charles Taylorpoints, in showing that perhaps there is one areaagain where a secular view of the world points tosomething transcendental, what he called “theexperience of fullness.” That we all have, in our lives,experiences which are rich, and fulfilling and

profoundly moving, and where we have theexperience of being taken over by something beyondourselves. It’s absolutely right, there are experiencesof fullness, but again, my question would be, arethese experiences less articulated and explained inthe language of transcendence and God?

At a slightly different level I would like Charles Taylorto explain to me, a little more fully than he does in thebook, the concept of spirituality. There are quite a fewpeople who would say, “Look, we understand what is moral, we understand what is right, we canunderstand what is an aesthetic experience or anemotional experience. What experiences can be best described as spiritual?” But if that is the wrongkind of question, what aspects of ordinaryexperiences or certain forms of unusual experiencesare best described as spiritual? I think there is, fromtime to time, a tendency to think that spirituality issomehow connected with religion, that is certainlytrue, but does it mean that spirituality cannot alsoform a part of the secular view of the world?

in the religious view. A very standard argument, onefinds that in Hegel, one finds that in Bradley, wherethe argument is that morality is ultimately transcendedin spirituality which is transcended in religion. I’m fascinated by this attempt to show that thesecular view is incoherent and ultimately points tosomething beyond.

My question to Charles Taylor is whether he succeedsin pulling this off? What are the pointers in the secularview that would seem to suggest that we ought to bethinking in terms of a more comprehensive religious

view within which the secular view is located as onemoment within a larger framework? He gives a coupleof examples, I don’t have the time to go through all ofthem in detail, but I will just mention one and alludeto the other.

I think very rightly Charles thinks that secular moralitylacks adequate moral motivation, especially when it isuniversalist in its sweep. “I should be concernedabout the well-being of all human beings. What wouldmotivate me to do that?” The usual argument: humandignity, we’re all equal. That gets in to all kinds ofdifficulties as Charles shows in this book and as hehas shown in Sources of the Self, so he is right topoint out that the question of moral motivationremains. The question therefore is, does religion, or the notion of transcendence in any way solve theproblem by providing the kind of motivation that he islooking for? One could argue, as I would like to argue,that ultimately morality should be located in the loveof goodness, and what drives us is the fact that wewant to be good human beings, and good humanbeings articulated in terms of justice, benevolence

...I would like Charles Taylor to explain to me, a little more fully than he does in the book, the concept of spirituality. ...what aspects of ordinary experiences or certain forms of unusual experiences are best described as spiritual?

COMMENTS BY LORD PAREKH Continued


cosmos and therefore doesn’t take the further step oftranscending the cosmos itself in the direction ofreligion. One might also raise a slightly differentquestion. When religion is defined in terms of belief inGod or in terms of God then secularity comes to becreated with atheism and that seems to me is not the case in Charles Taylor’s, but there are places infootnotes where I would have liked to have probedhim a little further. Since religion is defined in terms ofGod, secularity, which is supposed to be the oppositeof religion, which I think it’s not but nevertheless itcan be understood in that way, secularity comes to beassociated with atheism and that seems to me to bea mistake. Atheism implies that one denies theexistence of God, however God is defined. Secularityhas a different take on this question. It implies thatone has found no reason to postulate God andtherefore, neither to accept nor to deny. A beautifulremark which Karl Marx makes in Economic andPhilosophic Manuscripts is saying atheists are foolsand atheism has to be aufgehoben in the form ofsecularism where when you’re asked the question,“Do you believe in God?” you simply say, “I don’t see the point of the question.” It’s not that you are a-religious in the sense of being indifferent to religion.It’s rather that you don’t see the point of that which is supposed to lie at the centre of religion.

Humanism, and again here Charles makes anextremely interesting point when he is explaining thephenomenology of this movement. I must say that asI was reading the book I was put in mind of Hegel’sphenomenology because I think it’s that kind ofexperience, to make an age conscious of itself.Charles Taylor emphasises at several points the factthat this self contained, exclusive humanism, whereashuman self flourishing is the ultimate model role, is insome sense an important trend which has resulted inthe kind of journey that he is trying to explain. Nowhumanism can certainly be narrowly anthropocentric,a man centred, or man centred as a species, but itcan also be cosmocentric, as, for example, manyhuman beings are located within the larger contextand this is what green humanism or ecologicalhumanism is trying to do in wanting to go beyondanthropocentric humanism. It has, what Charles Taylorwould call, a spiritual, a green humanism, or ecologicalhumanism, it has a spiritual or even transcendentaldimension, but it does not transcend the cosmos, or, to use Charles Taylor’s distinction, the universe,because cosmos is what happens before 1800.

So, what I’m suggesting here is that one can have aform of humanism which transcends individualsociety, the species that locates itself within the

That is another thing. They say that Christian faithscan survive, so to say, without religious practice, butJudaism cannot. I understand the very OrthodoxJews, like the Jews living in Mea Shearim, to themJudaism or Jewishness is not a concept of nationality,but a religious concept, so therefore the Jew who isnot practising, a Jew who has abandoned religiouspractice is not a Jew in the proper sense. On theother hand I can understand Jewish people who livein Israel or elsewhere and consider themselves Jewsin the national sense, they can be nationalist even, but who abandoned their religion. There are Jewishorganisations, Jewish movements that generallyconsider the idea of a Jewish state in fact, how to putit, illegal or improper because precisely Jewishnesscannot be like – it understands them, it understandstheir attitude, their fear that Jewishness that tends to survive without the Jewish religion would not be Jewishness in the proper sense – so it woulddisappear even as a national concept, a national life.

As I said, among secular Jews in Israel, there isstrong antipode towards the Orthodox Jews who areso easily recognised at any time on the street. Andthere is something similar in Christian Catholic life, themovements like the followers of Archbishop Lefebvre,not that I would like to live under that jurisdiction. But I understand them. They are in despair about thefate of Christianity. This is a church in the way it lives,it’s infiltrated by moderness. It is moderness in thehistorical sense. One may say “Well what is the pointof a priest using or not using the priestly garments, itdoesn’t affect religion.” No, the Lefebvrists say, it isimportant. It is not a matter of dogma, it’s a matter ofChristian life or, more importantly, what is the problem

I would like to make one or two remarks concerningTaylor’s extremely right thought. The Jews tell me,and you would know better of course if it is true, that the main difference in the religious attitudes ofChristians and the Jews is that when a Christian singsor speaks about his religion, he has in mind mainly the doctrine, whereas the Jew has in mind mainly thelaw. That is a very important difference and for thisreason it is nothing unusual in that there are peoplewho are Christians in their mind, who are believingChristians but not practising, whereas among Jews it seems very unusual. They say Martin Buber was acase, but I don’t know. There are, of course, Jewswho are practising and not believing.

COMMENTS BY

Professor Leszek KolakowskiEmeritus Senior Research Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford University

I must admit that I haven’t read, in its entirety, the book of my oldfriend Charles Taylor and this is mainly because my sight is so poornow that I cannot read. My wife, Tamara, present here, read me some parts of it which were extremely important and rich.

Professor Leszek Kolakowski

COMMENTS BY LORD PAREKH Continued


intervention, various changes in that life, some good, that life from God, and more often than notthey’re disappointed.

Now, in terms of the so-called scientists’ worldview,that is proof enough to show the falsity of religion. In fact it is not. Christianity never promised that thegood we pray to God for will be delivered by God. No. It is not the point. The goods that people get fromreligion are mainly the sense of life and the sense ofcosmos, something that cannot be proved in the wayempirical truths of science are being proved. No, they cannot, but it doesn’t matter really for themeaning of religious life.

Therefore, people who are completely indifferent toreligion and religious life, they see that it doesn’tmatter, because I don’t get from God the goods that I pray for, they only are poorer in their spiritual andmental sense because they believe only in goods thatthey can touch, as it were, therefore religion is fornothing. Nevertheless we see that there are in theworld opposite movements, movements againstsecularity. I’m not sure about this very word“secularity,” it comes from seculum, the age, inEnglish and in some other languages, and in fact why seculum, to say 100 years should be the properword for it. For instance, in the Polish language, theadjective, “secular,” comes from “the world,worldly,” being, of course, understood in the sense ofSaint John, mundus in mundus, whereas the secularage seems to me often improper, but it is not ofcourse the main question.

I only would like to ask Taylor what he thinks reallyabout the conflict and the possible solution of theconflict between the scientific worldview and religion?Does he have any notion about how it might end or itmight change in the coming age? In the comingseculum? Thank you.

of celibacy? Why should celibacy continue, thecelibacy of secular priests of course, because, after all it’s not a matter of dogma, everybody knows howit emerged historically and it can be easily abolishedwithout touching any part of the Catholic doctrine. It seems so, but, I understand that they are afraid ofsuch change. They’re afraid of the entire way theCatholic Church took during and after the secondVatican Council.

There is a real danger that the Catholic, that is to say,the universal religion, will disappear. The main point of this doctrine and this controversy is, of course,religious liberty. Religious liberty implies that allreligions or all religious organisms are equal, not only in the legal sense that they’re legally allowed to survive but in the sense that they’re equal, thiscorpora of ideas which amounts to saying that thedoctrine is more or less indifferent. In fact, not justanybody says this in so many words, but in fact itleads easily to such a conviction. You are religiouswhether you might be Catholic or Buddhist or Jewishor Hindu, it doesn’t matter, because we have areligious freedom, which actually means it doesn’tmatter what is the content of your religion.

Now, what happened, and why this movementchanges the Christian world with such despair is oneof the main points of Charles Taylor’s book. I agreewith him entirely that the cause of this secularism isnot really the logical contradiction between scienceand religious doctrine. These two bodies of human lifecan survive, perhaps not quite without conflict, butnevertheless without fight. The difference is not thatpeople who are committed to a scientific view of theworld cannot therefore believe in religion. No, theycan, it is not a logical contradiction, but it is acontradiction I think in the hierarchy of values. Thescience delivers what it promises. Religion deliverssomething completely else. We can pray to God,people pray to God in order to cause, by divine

And, while I’m on the subject of Judaism, the Rabbisaid about Moses that when he had to do short hedid very short, and when he had to do long he didvery long. He said the shortest prayer on record inNumbers; five words, “Please God heal her now,”and on another occasion he prayed for forty days andforty nights after the golden calf. If I may say soProfessor Taylor, you’re in that tradition!

When you do short books they’re short. The Ethics ofAmbiguity, Modern Social Imaginaries, and when youdo long books, Sources of the Self, and, especiallythis 851-page epic, A Secular Age, you do very long,and they’re both wonderful.

I believe that Charles Taylor has done for metaphysicsand for the philosophy of religion what the late IsaiahBerlin did for political philosophy. You have given itback its history and when we read you, we breathe a wider air. I don’t think that anyone has broughtwider or richer perspectives to the philosophicalenterprise in our time than Charles Taylor, and therichness of his range of literary and other referencesis simply breathtaking.

There is also something else, and it deserves aphilosophical paper and it must be my ignorance fornot having seen it, and that is this: that when youcome to know somebody through their books, youreally come to know what kind of person they are.There is a tone of voice that a writer has that is there

If I may, I will begin by doing something rabbinic andnot entirely irrelevant. It is an enormous privilege topay tribute to one of the very, very great sages of ourtime and 2000 years ago the Rabbis coined a blessingto be said in the presence of a wise human being,including and especially a wise human being who isnot Jewish and not necessarily a believer, but whohad enlarged the intellectual horizons of humanity,and, if I may address this blessing to the almightyCharles Taylor, “Thank you, Lord our God, King of theUniverse, for bestowing your wisdom on creatures of flesh and blood. Amen.”

COMMENTS BY

Sir Jonathan SacksChief Rabbi of United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth

I feel very humbled and quite redundant in such intellectual companyand I must say I feel a little bit like the occasion when the 27th speakergot up to speak at a Jewish gathering and someone in the audienceturned to his neighbour and said, “What do we need another speechfor? Hasn’t everything already been said?” and his neighbour said,“Yes, everything has already been said, but not everyone has said it.”

Sir Jonathan Sacks

COMMENTS BY PROF. LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI Continued


question and this was the question: “Is there not anobligation to live within one’s time?”

It was a very interesting question, and the implicationwas clear, although it was unstated that in the title ofProfessor Taylor’s book, we live in a secular age andtherefore we cannot, with integrity, live in light ofbeliefs that, as it were, belong sometime else. And Iwant to ask, is that so? Having given philosophy backits history I want to ask, doesn’t the history of ideasitself have a history? Of course that is touched on inHermeneutics and others and you have written aboutit so eloquently in this book in chapters 9 and 19, butstill I wonder, might there perhaps be somethingmissing? Could it be that there is an ethics of historyas well as an epistemology of history? Let me explain.Could there not be, not in the Burkian sense, but inthe biblical sense, a covenant with the past thatsomehow in some sense, it makes sense to say “I am keeping faith with the past.” History, as itemerged as a category, lets say, in the 18th century,does, in fact, represent a certain kind of alienationfrom the past, something Hayim Yerushalmi wrote a book about, called Zakhor – Jewish History andJewish Memory. And might we not be suffering, as it were, from some kind of civilisational Alzheimer’s disease?

Are we not in danger of substituting history formemory? And is that, perhaps, not what you’re tryingto do? Bring back memory again? In Sources of theSelf and in A Secular Age, there is a tantalising hintright at the end where you quote the phrase fromRobert Bellah who hasn’t yet published the book, I gather, the idea that nothing is ever lost, and can

in the language that they use and the argumentativestructures, which are as clear a clue to character ashandwriting is to a graphologist, and when I readCharles Taylor, I know that this is not only anextraordinarily erudite and wise man, I know that thisis a good man, a gentle man, a generous man. He issomebody who takes pains to present the views ofthose with whom he disagrees, in the best possibleway. His work is a living example of what Quine andDworkin called “charity in interpretation” and that isas precious as it is rare.

What Professor Taylor has done in this book isnothing less than make it intellectually possible to talkabout God and religious faith again in philosophicalcircles. Not that other people have not paved the wayin their way, but that was not always possible. I cameto know the late Sir Isaiah Berlin rather late in his life,but I will never forget our first conversation. He said,“Chief Rabbi, don’t talk to me about religion, when it comes to God, I’m tone deaf.” And then he said, “But you studied philosophy, how is it you believe?”And I said, “Isaiah, if it helps, think of me as a lapsedheretic.” And he said, “I quite understand dear boy,”and, in the light of that, I just want to frame onequestion. When I began my doctorate I had just comeback from a religious seminary and I had come backvery religious and very bearded indeed and my

doctorate supervisor was the late Sir Bernard Williamswho was an atheist. He really was, he was not anagnostic, and his decency, what we call hismenschlekeit was superb, supreme. I learned somuch from him because never once did he challengemy religious beliefs. Only once did he touch on them, and he did so in a very oblique way, he asked me a

wilderness. You speak eloquently in the book aboutthe wilderness, but in a spacial rather than a temporalsense. The wilderness is the place between Egyptand the promised land, what Victor Turner called

liminal time, or what, in Judaism we call exile, or timeas a journey between a remembered past and afuture that lies just over the horizon. Might faith thenbe construed in the sense of that beautiful verse fromJeremiah where God says, “I remember the kindnessof your youth, the love of your betrothal, when youfollowed me through the wilderness, through anunsown, unknown land,” and might that not be the retrieval of meta-narrative that might put us in apost-postmodernist situation?

If we could perhaps explore that, we might achievewhat David Martin said so beautifully now, a horizonof hope, or what I call, faith in the future.

we recover memory. Now, I raise this as a seriouspoint. You have written very eloquently in some ofyour other books, about the impact of the ideas ofBakhtin and the dialogical imagination. And I’m

wondering whether one could not say more about,what I call, the chronological imagination. What I calltime as story rather than time as system, and indeed,obviously Paul Ricoeur has written even bigger booksthan you on this, but I’m thinking perhaps just verysketchily of what Jerome Bruner has written about inActual Minds, Possible Worlds and various other books.

Your speech in the book, for instance, quoting RobertWuthnow of the difference between dwellers andseekers. Others, like Sigmund Bauman, I haveforgotten who originated this, about the differencebetween pilgrims and tourists, but I was wondering if there isn’t a different kind of sense of time in theHebrew Bible? Time as a journey through the

What Professor Taylor has done in this book is nothing less than make it intellectually possible to talk about God and religiousfaith again in philosophical circles. Not that other people have not paved the way in their way, but that was not always possible.

You have written very eloquently in some of your other books, about the impact of the ideas of Bakhtin and the dialogical imagination.And I’m wondering whether one could not say more about, what I call, the chronological imagination.

COMMENTS BY SIR JONATHAN SACKS Continued


Lord Sutherland

a great, great interpreter of David Hume, and I thinkmany of his insights are not yet assimilated by theHumeian community.

Kemp Smith referred to Hume in all sorts of ways, butin an introduction to the Dialogues concerning NaturalReligion he referred to Hume as a “Presbyterianagnostic.” That phrase caught my attention becausein a sense it presages many of the things that I thinkyou’re doing in the book. It takes Hume’s clearlyagnostic position, but it sets it in the context ofbeliefs, ideas, and social structures of his time andactually, I think it’s a very insightful remark. I beganreflecting on this and what it took me to was the wayin which Hume, for example, had huge admiration for Bishop Butler, a good middle-of-the-road Anglican,a man who wanted to argue rationally for the basis of belief, something that Hume, in the end, rejected

That being said, I reckon that this might be the case,because if you’ve lived with the name Sutherland,initials S.U. all your life, then you tend to know that youtend to come at the end of speakers lists and here I am! It is, nonetheless a great delight, a specialdelight because I had the privilege of chairing, I think,two of the Gifford Lectures that are in fact the basisof chapters in this book, and, at the end of thoselectures, I wanted to say “And?” I had this vision, if I had been a cartoonist for The New Yorker, I wouldhave drawn a cartoon of Charles Taylor standing therewith a great hopper of ideas above him and they havecome down and he has distilled them into thismagnificent and extensive text which I foundimmensely stimulating.

I have had this book for a few days in my possession,and I would like to say I had read, marked, learnedand inwardly digested every sentence. But that wouldbe untrue at this stage, but the greatest complement I can pay the book apart from its stimulus is that it has accompanied me in two real journeys to and fromScotland at four hours each and in the course of thosejourneys I succeeded in ignoring all the mobile phonesbeing spoken into round about me and that takessome doing I can tell you! Your book did it for me.What should I do, I thought, at the end of the list inten minutes? If I can, I want to just put two points onthe table for discussion.

Firstly, the book is magnificently an interactionbetween the history of ideas and social history, and I wanted to give you another example of that whichI’ve worked on and thought about which I think raisesthe kind of question I want to put to you as othershave. The example starts with Norman Kemp Smith,

COMMENTS BY

Lord SutherlandFormer Principal, University of Edinburgh and Former President, Royal Society of Scotland

Thank you very much. I also thank Jonathan for giving me my openingline, to steal an expression from the book. “The social imaginary that I now inhabit is as 28th speaker at the colloquium.”

religious, it was how do you legitimate politicalauthority in this country where there are no traditionsof the English kind, no doomsday book, no attempt toset up some sort of parliament, no attempt to limitthe powers of the king in the same way. You limitedthe powers of the King by raising an army, that’s howyou did it then. In fact, part of Knox’s genius was thathe introduced the idea of first principles and rationalargument. Now, you may not agree with the firstprinciples that he started from, but nonetheless that is how he would counter conclusions politically,religiously and otherwise that he didn’t like.

If you look at the debates in the general assembly ofthe Church of Scotland in the 17th century, boy, I paidfor this, but if you look at those debates, you find thatthe arguments resisting the notion of bishops beingimposed on a Calvinistic Presbyterian church wereresisted on the basis of argument from first principle.The arguments in favour of bishops were produced

on the basis of arguments by analogy. You didn’t have to be Mandeville to argue that just because theswarm needs a queen, so the flock needs a bishop and these were the kinds of arguments used and theanalogy has stood in one mindset but not in another. I think that is the basis for Kemp Smith’s legitimatedifference between those two which is very much I think in line with the kind of thing that you’re doingand simply could exemplify further the ways in whichthat happened.

But that leaves the question in my own mind, “Well,what now? What next?” We have a magnificentanalysis, we understand the move from 1500 to 2000.

completely. His respect for Butler, I think, comes to its sharpest point in the attachment that Butler madeto the concept of analogy and argument by analogy.We still think of him as the man who wrote Butler’sAnalogy, and Hume’s biting criticisms of argumentsfrom Analogy in the Dialogues, particularly in part fivewhere he shreds them.

At times I wanted somebody to shred some of theconnections that you were making, but then I had to say, “Well, if he has historical context and is a man of his time, what does this mean in terms of the difference between him and Butler?” And thedifference, actually, they did belong to two verydifferent societies. Butler belonged to England and aspart of the English structure, as part of the centre ofthe Anglican Church, much stronger then than now,he inhabited a world in which questions of authority,political and religious, went hand in hand.

But there were ways of settling what the issues wereand what the outcomes were. He could appeal to the traditions to which he belonged, whether withinthe political system, within the parliamentary system,or within the church. That means that a whole seriesof analogues were available to him that naturally hecould use.

Hume and the Scots didn’t have this, because untilthe reformation basically political authority was settledby who had the biggest tribe standing behind him.That’s slightly a caricature and some might say it stillhas application but that is to be settled tomorrow!The issue at the time of the Reformation wasn’t just

...the greatest compliment I can pay the book apart from its stimulus isthat it has accompanied me in two real journeys to and from Scotlandat four hours each and in the course of those journeys I succeeded inignoring all the mobile phones being spoken into round about me andthat takes some doing I can tell you! Your book did it for me.


inhabit a world of nomads, rather than a world inwhich the line of the pilgrim is marked out for us,which is probably true for most of us these days, then you’re looking for the insights which are worthretaining, and the argument comes in saying, “Whythis insight? Why that insight? Why do you spendtime thinking about whoever it is?” And we’ve had amarvellous list of names. This metaphor I think fitswith other attempts to do some of the things youreferred to. You mentioned in the book that you don’tpursue the line that Alistair MacIntyre did. I mean he’s done it so why do that, but I think there arereasons in MacIntyre as to why this is the case today, the disintegration of knowledge and the loss of the picture of the tree of knowledge, or the houseof knowledge.

You certainly pay attention, I was delighted to see,and others have mentioned, to Isaiah Berlin. I thinkthat he’s going beyond that, I think that he’s sayingactually the idea of a single vision of the good simplydoesn’t work. I’m not sure I’m persuaded that Charles Taylor was implying that the secular view isincoherent, I thought more inadequate, incomplete.That is a different set of terms to use, but if Berlin isright, and I think he is, that adds intellectual weight tothe process that you have been examining whereby in fact there is unlikely to be emerging, other thanthrough force and the use of violent methods, a singlepilgrim-like position to which we can all assimilate. So what is it we can have in common? What we canhave in common is an agreement that there are manyinsights that are spread eclectically through the moral,spiritual, intellectual and artistic world that is ourheritage, and increasingly that’s a global heritage, and we live in that position rather than in the positionof the pilgrim. Thank you very much.

What next? Where is the discourse that someonewho wants to argue belief and unbelief, whicheverside you’re on, where is the discourse which they caninhabit to allow you to raise the question that clearlyHume thought he was raising, “Actually, is all thisstuff true?” And there is still a bit of me that wants todo that and argue whatever the consequences of thefact that we all live as part of a history and we inhabitour own age and Hume was a Presbyterian Agnostic.I have to say I’m quite happy with that as distinctfrom a lapsed agnostic, this is fine.

Still, the questions are there, “Is there a place forthem?” In trying to come to terms with this, Isuppose what I’ve done is tried to substitute onemetaphor for another, and the metaphor that I want to remove from our thinking, in terms of our currentposition, is that of a pilgrim. Once upon a time, by and large, the notion of what the goal was wasunderstood, the real difficulty is getting there.Whether it be through the slough of despond orwhether it be X, Y, or Z, there were always difficultiesin getting there.

I think our current position is, and you have justillustrated this magnificently here, that we don’t havethat common mindset now. You’ve understood in allsorts of ways that I never did why we don’t have that,you’ve communicated that, but where are we now? I would suggest an alternative metaphor, we arenomads, spiritual, intellectual and moral nomads, andthe difference between the pilgrim and the nomad is not that the pilgrim knows where he’s going andthe nomad is lost. Nomads are not lost, if they werethey would soon die out. Intellectually, spiritually andethically what nomads do is preserve insights whichmakes continuing life possible and as valuable aspossible and of as high a quality as possible. If we

I would like to thank all our commentators, they’ve brought up so manythemes, and that’s not an easy thing to do when a long book is a new book. I know that many of us are very much looking forward to hearing CharlesTaylor’s thoughts, responses and comments, so Charles, over to you.

BARONESS O’NEILL

was to re-think our whole way of thinking aboutsecularisation, which in the West is very muchshaped by, or you might even say, prisoner of, acertain kind of master narrative. Just in parenthesis, I think all this attack that we’ve had from post-modernists on the invocation of master narratives isvery, very misguided, for the reason that, when wethink of these big historical issues, of secularisationand so on, we’re always thinking in terms of masternarratives. The only difference is are we clear thatwe’re doing that, or are we inhabiting the masternarrative without knowing that we’re doing it? Soeven post-modernists say, “Well you see it was likethis, there was this epoch in which everybody wasgrasping for master narratives and then along cameJean- François Lyotard or whoever it was and nowwe’re beyond that and we’re not into masternarratives.” Of course you can see right away thepragmatic contradiction involved in seeing things inthese terms.

So what is it about the master narrative, the one thatinhabited talk about secularisation which I thoughtneeded changing? Well, there are several things, andreally the big picture of the book is that I’ve taken offfrom one master narrative and tried to get beyond it.I’m not sure I have a totally stable replacement for it,but the master narrative I wanted to get away fromwas this. There is something called modernity ormodernisation and we don’t need to define this very

First of all I’m wondering how to answer thequestions, and I’m sure I’m not very capable ofanswering the questions, but I’m wondering howeven to make my non-answers sound coherent. Ithink a good way of doing that is to start off by takinga theme that was picked up by a number of speakersin a different way, which is this question of time, or narrativity, of our relation to our age.

One way of talking about the basic purpose of thebook, and this is one of the inhabiting goals of thebook which I hope I’ve made some progress in,

COMMENTS BY

Professor Charles Taylor

I myself am very overwhelmed by the tremendously interestingremarks coming from very different directions that we’ve heard at the table here.

Professor Charles Taylor

COMMENTS BY LORD SUTHERLAND Continued


Against, and indeed drawing very much on DavidMartin’s work here I have to say, I think that his book,and I’m very much an amateur here in reading theliterature of sociology, his book was liberation for me,because for the first time he introduced this notionthat first of all there are obviously very differentprocesses going on in different kinds of society evenin the West. That is that the story of what we want tocall, vaguely, secularisation in either of these sensesis very different in the Anglo-Saxon society than it is in the Latin Catholic societies, and it is again differentin the Lutheran domain and you can break this downeven further. So there are national or regional stories,and the operation isn’t uniform across all contexts.

The second very important thing that is really thehinge of a lot of argument in the book is that it alsoisn’t linear, and really, the stories, and we have to say“stories” not “story,” in these different domains arenot linear. But there is an insight underlying theoriginal secularisation thesis. The insight is thatcertain, particularly historical forms of religious life are indeed destabilised by certain developments wespeak of as one of the package of developments we call modernisation. For instance, the kind ofreligious life you have in late medieval CatholicFrance, a kind of sacral monarchy in a certain sense,complete with the power of the King to cure scrofulaby touch and with sacred places and so on, justplainly cannot survive, did not survive, is destabilisedby the development of the more, if you like, horizontalassociative notions of society that we have in themodern world.

There is a very poignant moment when this becameevident, the restoration in France in 1815. Who was it that said, “walking back having learnt nothing andforgotten nothing.” This was truer of the secondsuccessor, the first one was Louis XVIII and thenCharles X came to the throne in 1825 and he wantedto, one hundred percent, legitimise and reproduce theold monarchy in its entirety. So he had a coronationceremony address, including people coming forward

closely. It’s differently defined but it involves suchdevelopments as the growth of science as we knowit, technological society, and market economy, whichis constantly predicated on growth and development. I could go on and on with a number of things that weall recognise as features of what we think of asmodernity. In any case the secularisation thesis,which was for so long dominant, was that there wasa uniform relation of causation between the growth ofthese markers of modernity, however you namethem, on one hand, and secularisation on the otherhand. That modernity and the developments of modernity were the independent variables whichwere bringing about, in a uniform fashion,secularisation as the dependent variable, and justbriefly, this secularisation had two broad meaningswhich were not confused but thought to run together.One is the retreat of religion from public space, that’sthe order in principle of society, and the other was theretreat of belief or practice. These two don’t necessarilygo together, as we know, we can have states inwhich religion ceases to be the central organisingprinciple but in which faith or practice is very alive.We can have societies in which religion is still theorganising principle but faith and practice havereceded, but the idea was that these two, withoutrunning exactly in parallel, run sort of together, andthey are brought about by these developments wecall “modernisation” or “modernity.”

So, I’ll spare all the details, and it’s very interestingstuff, about differentiation, post-Weberian notionsabout that and so on. I think this narrative isfundamentally wrong in two very important ways. The idea that there is this causal relation is wrong,both because it sees this as a universal, it’s alwayshappening, in other words wherever thesedevelopments of modernity occur they have a similareffect. And it thinks of them also as linear, that is, themore you have these developments, the more youhave the developments called secularisation.

we hold these truths to be self-evident and humanbeings are created equal and have certain inalienablerights. Or, you could have the Polish case which ofcourse we know we have here a particularconfessional marker which becomes that which rallies Poles and so on.

Now, these modern recompositions themselvesdestabilised and what we see, therefore, there’s no longer a history, but histories, histories ofdestabilisation, recomposition, and you can end up, interms of the most important factor of secularisation,with the retreat of belief and practice. You end upwith situations in these different trajectories that havea tremendous spectrum, all the way from let’s say,East Germany, perhaps the nadir point of belief andpractice in the Western World. I say East Germanybecause it doesn’t exist on the map but boy, it stillexists in the mind. If you cross that border in Berlin,you know there is another universe there on onehand. And perhaps the United States, close to theother end of the spectrum. So the whole thing, interms of a nice neat, universally applicable and linearfunction just doesn’t work, but as a series of different,interesting stories I think you can unlock it if youstudy each case carefully, with this paradigm in mindof destabilisation and recomposition.

Before I get to the second point I want to pick upsomething that Bhikhu (Lord Parekh) was saying, that“Why did I do this book in this strange way?” This isnot a question that’s bothering me, of talking aboutLatin Christendom from 1500. That is because I wasvery aware of all the things that Bhikhu said earlier.When you’ve done a certain amount of this you’ll findit impossible to go back. One of the horrendousmistakes of most secularisation theory is that theytook religion as one single thing which is going to bedeclining and when you begin to look at the differencebetween India and the West you become immediatelyaware that there is a fantastic variety. So you know, I could have got stuck in the first chapter and youwould have been spared this whole book! In the

with scrofula and so on, and the whole thing totallyfell flat. It was like running a scenario of ancientGreece in the middle of Piccadilly Circus, it justcouldn’t work. The idea would have been to have re-ignited this sense of the Catholic monarchy, and in its original format it just couldn’t happen.

So there is this great insight in the whole secularisationthesis where people have picked up on theincompatibility of certain original forms with certaindevelopments of what we call modernisation. Butwhat is missing here is recomposition that religiouslife can, as it were, recompose itself, or, if you like, lifearound religion or a religious metaphysics which canenter the scene here, can recompose itself differentlyin different societies and with a much greatercomponent of non-religious or antireligiousmetaphysical views in some societies than in others.

So, what you need is a set of regional stories in whichthere is this alternation between destabilisation andrecomposition, and then if you think of it in thoseterms, you have to think, and again David haspioneered this to some degree, of the great movementin the West of the 1960s. It’s variously characterisedas another great destabilisation movement in whichreligious forms were destabilised, including,interestingly, some of the forms that were powerfullyrecomposed as a result of the destabilisation of the earlier forms, particularly the ones I’ve called neo-Durkheimian, where you get societies that arerecognisably modern in the sense that they’re basedon the idea that we mobilise everyone together ascitizens according to certain basic markers. You know,we’re republican French or Polish or British and so on,we mobilise as equal citizens around a certain numberof markers which define the society.

But in this case we could have a very powerful newform, if you like, of the presence of God in societybecause the markers can have a religious reference,as I think the original U.S. republic founding clearlydid, with the idea of a providential design. You know,

COMMENTS BY PROF. CHARLES TAYLOR Continued


idea that there are universals that apply. That is why I took the book the way I did, at that level of “Let’slook at Latin Christendom,” which was already byanticipation, as it were, of breaking with the masternarrative that I hope I succeeded in deconstructing or at least very much shaking.

But, there’s another element of this master narrativethat I think we have to come to grips with. That is thatthere are indeed certain common elements involvedin the different Western cases. I am trying to get atthem by getting a sense of our way of imagining theworld we inhabit today both socially and cosmicallyand the ways in which it’s different from earlier times.This is very difficult and it’s a work in progress and I’msure it’s going to be torn apart but I hope that havingsaid it this way will help the tearing apart to be aconstructive process which brings us ahead.

One of the things that I think is really key is thisimmanent/transcendent distinction, and that’s anotherway of addressing Bhikhu’s question. There is animmanent transcendent distinction which has come to make sense in this world, Latin Christendom, theWestern world, which doesn’t apply anywhere else.

middle of the first chapter the thing almost came to an end because I couldn’t think exactly how I could define what is supposed to be declining. It’s going to be a discussion of a decline thesis, then the decline of what?

So I took a simple way out, an utterly cowardly wayout, but I think the only fruitful way out, which was to say, I really broke with the idea of a universallyapplicable thesis. It’s a book. There is a process in Latin Christendom and its successor states,successive societies, where there is sufficient unitybecause of sufficient intercommunication betweenthe units of it. You can get some kind of generalsense of what is going on, even though you have tobreak down the detail into the Anglo trajectory andthe Lutheran trajectory and so on. But neverthelessthere is sufficient unity here so we can get a storyabout the decline, or non-decline, some are declining,some are not declining, of this, so what’s ’this’?

That allows you to look at certain features ofChristianity, Christianity and Judaism, perhaps theJudeo-Christian outlook, to be able to get a handle onwhat you’re studying the decline and non-decline of,without prejudice to whatever studies might be doneelsewhere. And this cowardly, but I think prudentapproach, looks forward to our making headway inthis whole subject by a series of such studies,hopefully more narrowly defined than mine, which is perhaps already too broad, in which we can beginto trace interesting connections and spillovers andanalogies with what has gone on in Islamic society or what’s gone on in Indian society.

There are fascinating elements of inter-influence andcertain European thoughts about religions, and in theBritish case, very much influenced by the impact ofIndia. What must emerge, of course, from the otherside, is reformulating some sense of their Hindu beliefin the light of the experience of Christianity. So thereis a certain spillover but you don’t start off with the

is a sense in which, and I use the word ’secular’ but itcould be ’worldly,’ as Leszek says, this is a secularage for everybody. The idea of a secular age assomething self-explanatory is so important for us andin that sense we’re all secularist.

So the issue is how do we, or do we? Do we try tomove beyond, how do we try to move beyond?These are the issues which arise, and I think there aretwo things I’m trying to say about this, and here I’mgoing into Jonathan’s question on the one hand whichI wish I could answer but he sees I’m struggling toanswer. In the dominant form of the master narrativeas it’s been constructed, it wasn’t just a masternarrative of secularisation, it was our master narrativeat the rise of modernity. Again it’s the Scots to whomwe owe this, Jonathan, these wonderful stadialtheories of Ferguson and so on, stages of history. The stages are not reminiscent but anticipatory ofMarx, in terms of the way human beings live, thehunter-gathering stage, the nomadic stage, agriculturalstage and then commercial society. We still think like that, only we now say an industrial society, thepost-industrial society and we get to the point wherewe’re kind of “stage” struck in the sense that wethink of history moving in that way, where there isone feature of this stage construction – it’s supposedto have a ratchet effect, in other words, you don’t goback. So when you get to commercial society youcan’t go back to the earlier forms of society.

Gibbon has a wonderful line somewhere where he said, I can’t remember exactly, but “Could theBarbarians invade again,” roughly speaking, and“reduce us all to rubble?” Well the Barbarians didn’tseem very strong in those days compared to theEuropeans, but the main point why Gibbon thoughtthat we could be optimistic is that the technology that we have, and so on, would rapidly reconstitutecivilisation out of the ruins, even if the Barbarians did invade. This is my idea of the ratchet effectoperating in Gibbon.

That is another point where you realise that attemptsto use these concepts as universals just break down.You can see this both in the cosmology post-Galileoand natural science, but also in post-Grotian orLockean understanding of society and also in a host of other ways which you could, in a sense, say thatwe commonly believe. Generally all of us have asense of an immanent world whose explanatoryprinciples are within it. We can explain the operationof the physical cosmos in terms of the concepts thatare thrown up by physics.

The possibility of there being something more thanthis is not necessarily excluded, and here we’re goingback to what Leszek was talking about. Some peopledo think it’s included by the way in which wescientifically explain this cosmos and others don’t. But the way that the problem has to situate itself forus in this culture is that there is an immanent self-explanatory world. We can get a concept of socialjustice, a concept of how to explain the workings ofthe physics around us, a concept of the human orderwhich we think is just and adequate and so on, or,without necessary reference to what is, or is not,beyond. I believe this is not something that really waspresent as an option in earlier ages or societies andwhat is interesting is that it would appear that almostall human societies had some idea of the higherbeings and the higher levels and the mundane, this-worldly levels.

So we have the first-off illusion that immanenttranscendence makes sense. In the world of Plato,there are the things that are in the flux and then theideas that are beyond the flux. But of course it isn’tthe same kind of thing because for Plato,understanding all this stuff in the flux can only bedone by referring to the ideas that are beyond theflux. In all sorts of ways, in pre-modern Western andthe modern Western worldviews, I don’t believe youever had such a clear cut distinction between theimminent order and the transcendent order. So thereJohn M. Templeton, Jr. with Templeton Prize Laureates: Sir Sigmund Sternberg (1998);

John Barrow (2006); Charles Taylor; Paul Davies (1995); and George Ellis (2004).



celebrate Baconian and so on, even though, at theother side of their minds they’ve accepted someother thesis.

The kinds of revolutionary, utopic ideas which arethen defended or not on the stage for us, thesepeople, nevertheless are living that reflex virtually inrelation to those sources. So we have to have anothersense of our relation to time which is much morecomplex. I wanted to make this point too, even ourunderstanding of the way that different levels of timefit together, we can’t simply go with the one that wehave today. I tried to make a long discussion of theway in which we form Christianity, deconstructed the understanding of time, involving a motion of orderand underlying chaos, in which the order allows for areversal of the world turned upside down. For certainperiods the order is suspended and then the ordercomes back. We can look at the way in which we canlive in relation to time for periods of reversal, openingup, loosening up of the order that we have, the abilityto look at this and live it from outside and see itslimitations. This is something that doesn’t need todisappear. Even our very narrow understanding thatsecular time is all there is is not something we’retotally trapped in.

So, these are two ways in which I wanted to loosenup the narrative. First, a simple causal narrative, theuniversality of time linearly working its way outagainst a narrative of particular national stories, andthese being formed by destabilisations andrecompositions. And then the idea, the very powerfulidea, laid down in the modern stadial narrative whichtends to make us think that when we’ve moved outof that stage it’s unavailable to us. So we say thingslike “That’s progressive” or “That’s medieval” or“That belongs to another age.” The implication wasthat you can’t be outside your age. This is a verycomplex thing, because what I’m trying to say is thatin a sense you can’t and you shouldn’t be outside ofyour age if you’re thinking that you can ignore and not relate to the way that things fit together today.

It is this ratchet effect that I want very much toquestion in the spiritual realm, and that is where I picked up on Robert Bellah’s idea. I’m waiting with baited breath for his book which is absolutelyfascinating. I stole some of his ideas because he sent me some chapters, that these different phasesof human spirituality, which in their combination, for instance the combination of a certain idea of thesacred in the French monarchy, has been relegated to history, but these various forms of relating to thesacred have not been relegated to history. I referagain to David Martin’s work and Bernice Martin’swork and it is very interesting on the Pentecostalmovement, that there are some recurrences topractices that would have been condemned by earlier,more austere Calvinistic modes of Protestantism asmagical and so on.

There are currents of these coming back on to the scene, re-composed in a completely newcombination. They have very little to do with thecombination of the way that they may have occurredin Catholic Christian culminations earlier, but in a veryimportant sense nothing is really lost, and, in ourrelation to the spiritual I think that Jonathan isabsolutely right. We’ll get to Jewish Christian now, a very parochial part of the world here in which thenotion of covenant is a key way of reflecting that. We are not living simply in this age, in that respect.That is, as I think of myself writing about my ownfaith, thinking of the force of a figure like St. Francis ofAssisi, who still comes across to me across all thesecenturies with immense force. I can see somethingthere very powerful, a representation of what I thinkis the essence of Christian faith or one way ofreflecting it which still speaks to me today. In thatsense, if we’re thinking we could repeat exactly theFranciscan order as it was founded, then no, ofcourse not, that couldn’t be done. But, if we think of the spiritual sources by which we live, they couldnever be confined to today, and where we are now.This is even true of totally humanistic movements,some of them will celebrate Lenin and others will

feet.” That looks as though this is a terribly emptysociety but it’s not. Its fullness can be of a quitedifferent kind, provided that there are spiritualmovements within it which don’t get conned intothinking that they have to live, as it were, totallywithin this age. This is where I’m aiming at, notwhere I got to in the book. You can see that I am, inan incoherent way, trying to move towards anotherconstrual of how we fit in to time and live in time.

The last point that underpins all this, obviously I’mstarting from working out of the social scienceunderstanding, is that a purity of social science whichaims at universal laws is never going to cut it, is neverreally going to get to the interesting stuff. I’m talkingnow of Weber, Rickert and so on. Social science lawsalways need to be at least complemented, if notlargely replaced by – to use the Heidelberg language –idiographic studies that look at certain historical casesand trace them through. So in that case you not onlyhave ideographic, which is the story of a particular andthe study of the particular has a heavy dependence onnarratives. You understand what’s happening, notthrough simple timeless laws, “The more of this the less of that” or what have you. You have tounderstand these laws narratively, worked outnarratively in order to get real understanding. That is another great Grande Illusion, a great illusion of social science, to think you can get away from this. The necessity of narrativity, coming back to mybeginning point, it is so necessary that everybodyoperates with meta-narratives and I’m trying todeconstruct the dominant one now. Not to leave us in a kind of Jean- François Lyotard paradise wherenobody has one, but rather, I’m struggling towardsanother to replace that, which I think is going to bemore adequate and less cramping and less distorted.

So thank you, I’ll stop here, but thank you so much.

But, if you mean by that that you can’t retrievespiritual sources that are totally spurned in this ageand largely marginalized in this age and come fromsomewhere else then you’re fooling yourself. That’snot the way that human life works, we’re not trappedin that way. So the notion of a predominantly dualcovenant can make very profound sense to people.Then the big issue is to see how to live this covenantnow, in other words, in the total way that wecompose our age today, how to live this. One way inwhich obviously this has a different answer is that ourpredecessors thought that Christendom is the obviousone, in which Christianity should be, must be, lived.

It seems to me that if we really understand our agetoday that is totally wrong. What we still have is largeelements of Christian churches who are still clingingon to that in various ways, trying as it were to formthe common understanding. Someone mentioned thisabout a common understanding that we all live by.The worrying factor for some people is that there isn’t a single common understanding of the mostimportant spiritual truths by which our modernsocieties can live, it can’t be shared. What is shared is a rather thin collection, but a very importantcollection of principles, the principles of equality, of non-discrimination, of rights and so on. I don’tmean by “thin” that these are not strong and that they aren’t right, but these are shared by people from very different points of view and they’re justified invery different ways.

So from the outside this kind of society looks like avery empty society. If you ask what is there in thepublic square between people in common, wellthere’s consumer society, people trying to getprosperous, and then there are a few, as it were,traffic control principles, such as “When you’re tryingto get what you need don’t step over someone else’s



We welcome new nominations forthe Templeton Prize for ProgressToward Research or DiscoveriesAbout Spiritual Realities.

Information forms may be obtained by contacting:

Templeton PrizeCanyon Institute for Advanced Studies3217 East Shea Boulevard, Suite 622Phoenix, Arizona 85028 USATel 602.639.7206 Fax 602.391.2683

[email protected]

PrincipalsSir John Templeton, Chairman Emeritus

John M. Templeton, Jr., M.D.,Chairman and President

Mrs. Barbara Small, Executive Director

2007 JudgesDewi Fortuna Anwar, Ph.D.

Baruch S. Blumberg, M.D., Ph.D.

His Eminence Daniel Ciobotea, Ph.D.

Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D.

Mary Ann Glendon, J.D., L.L.M.

Prof. Kaikhosrov D. Irani

Rev. Dr. John C. Polkinghorne, KBE, FRS

Walter E. Thirring, Ph.D.

Prof. M.S. Swaminathan

Templeton Prize Laureates2007 Prof. Charles Taylor, philosopher, Montreal, Canada

2006 Prof. John D. Barrow, cosmologist, Cambridge, England

2005 Prof. Charles H. Townes, physicist, Berkeley, California, USA

2004 Prof. George F. R. Ellis, cosmologist, Cape Town, South Africa

2003 Prof. Holmes Rolston, III, philosopher, Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA

2002 The Rev. Dr. John C. Polkinghorne, scientist and theologian, Cambridge, England

2001 The Rev. Canon Dr. Arthur Peacocke, scientist and theologian, Oxford, England

2000 Prof. Freeman Dyson, scientist, Princeton, New Jersey, USA

1999 Prof. Ian Barbour, scientist and theologian, Northfield, Minnesota, USA

1998 Sir Sigmund Sternberg, businessman, London, England

1997 Sri Pandurang Shastri Athavale, founder of the Swadhyaya movement, Bombay, India

1996 Dr. William R. Bright, evangelist, Orlando, Florida, USA

1995 Prof. Paul Davies, scientist, Adelaide, South Australia

1994 Michael Novak, philosopher and theologian, Washington, DC, USA

1993 Charles W. Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship, Washington, DC, USA

1992 The Rev. Dr. Kyung-Chik Han, Presbyterian pastor, Seoul, Korea

1991 The Rt. Hon. The Lord Jakobovits, former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain and the Commonwealth, London, England

1990 Awarded jointly to: Baba Amte, of the Anandwan community, India Prof. Charles Birch, biologist, Sydney, Australia

1989 Awarded jointly to: The Very Rev. The Lord MacLeod, of the Iona Community, Scotland Prof. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, physicist, Starnberg, Germany

1988 Dr. Inamullah Khan, former Secretary-General, World Muslim Congress, Karachi, Pakistan

1987 The Rev. Prof. Stanley L. Jaki, OSB, astrophysicist, South Orange, New Jersey, USA

1986 The Rev. Dr. James I. McCord, former Chancellor of the Center of Theological Inquiry,Princeton, New Jersey, USA

1985 Sir Alister Hardy, founder of the Sir Alister Hardy Research Centre at Oxford, England

1984 The Rev. Michael Bourdeaux, founder of Keston College, Oxford, England

1983 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author, Russia

1982 The Rev. Dr. Billy Graham, founder of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, USA

1981 Dame Cicely Saunders, founder of the modern hospice movement, London, England

1980 Prof. Ralph Wendell Burhoe, founder and former editor of the journal Zygon, Chicago, Illinois, USA

1979 The Rev. Nikkyo Niwano, founder of Rissho Kosei-Kai and World Conference on Religion and Peace, Japan

1978 The Very Rev. Prof. Thomas F. Torrance, former Moderator of the Church of Scotland

1977 Chiara Lubich, founder of the Focolare Movement, Italy

1976 H.E. Leon Joseph Cardinal Suenens, former Archbishop of Malines-Brussels

1975 Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, former President of India and Oxford Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics

1974 Brother Roger, founder and Prior of the Taizé Community in France

1973 Mother Teresa of Calcutta, founder of the Missionaries of Charity

Templeton Prize

Canyon Institute for Advanced Studies3217 East Shea Boulevard, Suite 622Phoenix, Arizona 85028 USATel 602.639.7206 Fax 602.391.2683

[email protected]

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